Resilience Fund to support the final stages of Taranaki Emergency Management’s Needs Assessment Tool

Taranaki Emergency Management is one of eight successful recipients of the Civil Defence Emergency Management Resilience Fund grant this year.

The Resilience Fund aims to enhance New Zealand hazard risk resilience by supporting local and regional projects that improve emergency management capability and contribute to resilience.

The grant provided to Taranaki Emergency Management will support the final stages of their Registration Needs Assessment (RANA) tool.

From RANAs creation during the COVID-19 pandemic, Taranaki Emergency Management has been on a journey across three years to create a needs assessment tool with the ability to collect, analyse, and manage the welfare needs in a consistent manner across the Taranaki region during an emergency event.

Needs assessment capability is critical to any emergency response and is the process of understanding the needs of people affected by an emergency.

The project is set to receive $35,200 from the Resilience Fund which will support the final development stages and enhancements of RANA. This will see additions such as duplication detection, simplified query, priority flagging, GIS integration and tasking enhancements to allow tasking of external organisations.

Taranaki Emergency Management Group Welfare Manager Kaz Lawson says that with the additional enhancements, RANA will provide a system able to assist with meeting the immediate and ongoing welfare needs of people, and coordinate the actions required to meet those needs in an integrated and flexible way whilst meeting New Zealand privacy standards.

“The tool enables organisations during the response and recovery of an event to gather the associated needs of individuals, and whānau including information on financial needs, animal welfare, accommodation, household goods and services, and manaaki wellbeing,” says Lawson.

Allowing welfare teams to be able to collect, analyse, prioritise, assign, and task needs more effectively during emergencies is a priority for Lawson.

“Previously we have not been able to task externally, but the introduction of this enhancement means if the welfare team received an assessment from a person requiring financial assistance this can then be tasked to Ministry of Social Development (MSD). We have not had capability to be able to do this before,” explains Lawson.

Lawson says once the project is complete it will be available for sharing across all civil defence emergency management (CDEM) groups.

“We recognise the importance of integrated effort, partnership and collaboration within the CDEM sector in order to function at a high-level during disaster or emergency. We see the outcomes of RANA with these additional enhancements to be beneficial across a number of the CDEM groups.”

The project team are currently working through the implementation of each of the new enhancements and are excited to see this next stage of RANA complete.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the other successful projects supported by the Resilience Fund.

Published: Aug 16, 2023, 3:15 PM